“While some on the Left or even in the media might say that the President has been one to break ‘norms,’ I would argue just the opposite,” White House spokesman Judd Deere wrote in an email. “And there’s some areas where it’s probably not been so helpful.” There are some things in which his disruptive nature has really moved policy forward,” Spicer says. “You can argue that it’s not the most presidential thing to tweet at Angela Merkel about, you know, the percent of GDP that Germany pays to meet their NATO obligation. Sean Spicer, the president’s first press secretary, says that Trump’s style has allowed him “to actually get things done.” Spicer cites trade policy and the 2017 tax cut as examples. His delight in breaking norms - and the establishment’s shock at his antics - provides proof to his supporters that he is doing something right. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)Īnd yet, Trump’s transgressions have been a source of his populist power. Goldsmith and others argue that Trump’s steamrolling of norms could do lasting damage to both the stature of the presidency and the institutions of democracy if reforms aren’t devised to bolster the fragile tissue of these shared understandings. The current presidency also reveals “the extent to which the whole system before Trump was built on a basic assumption about a range of reasonableness among presidents, a range of willingness to play within the system, a range of at least a modicum of understanding of political and normative constraints.” Bush administration who teaches at Harvard Law School. One of the things Trump has forced presidential scholars to realize “is the extent to which shamelessness in a president is really empowering,” says Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official in the George W.
Can Trump steer taxpayer money to his businesses? Can he call for the investigation of his political rivals? Can he fire people in oversight positions and replace them with loyalists? Yes - technically - he can. Violating presidential norms doesn’t equate to breaking the law.
To a remarkable extent, the presidency is shaped by unwritten traditions and expectations that historians and political scientists call “norms” - what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “soft guardrails” of American democracy. What does it mean to be presidential? Article II of the Constitution describes the office in just a handful of paragraphs. I can be more presidential than any president in our history - with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln when he wore the hat. I’m more presidential if I wanted to be, but I got to get things done,” he said. “I always said, it’s much easier to be ‘presidential’ than to do what I do. He reflected on what sets him apart from every other president in American history: his refusal to be presidential. At a frenetic and freewheeling rally in Macon, Ga., in mid-October, with less than three weeks to go before the election, President Trump turned introspective.
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